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Monday, 10 February 2014

Slavoj Žižek Demands Revolutionary Terror

Marxists have often come clean
about their demanding the impossible from the capitalist
state. They do so because they know full well that the state cannot
grant their impossibilist demands – by definition. Again, Marxists
know that they are literally demanding the impossible. That's the
whole point!

So why do Marxists like Žižek
demand the impossible? They do so to primarily to destabilise
the state and also to radicalise people (at least in theory). When
Marxists demand that the state change water into wine, or provide
free second cars for all, they know that it won't come up with
the goods. Therefore the people, or workers - Marxists hope - will
get angry at this and storm the barricades.

Similarly Marxists
effectively promise a welfare state that will be perfect in every
respect. Then they demand the same from the actually-existing state.
However, because Marxists are knowingly demanding the impossible,
they hope that the people, or workers (at least in theory), will
rebel and then bring forth a revolution. And that's precisely why
Marxists hate counter-revolutionaries such as non-Marxist socialists
and the "postmodernists" Žižek himself
castigates. Such wimps don't demand the impossible and
therefore they'll never bring about a revolution.

Žižek,
in his own words, also believes in the “Big State”. He's
categorically against “the need to curtail Big State expenditure
and administration” (page 123). He believes in the Big State in
precisely the same way Stalin believed in it. There are no apologies
from Žižek here. In fact
he is explicit about his Big State dreams. He says that True
Marxists, such as himself, will never defend themselves “by
saying... we are no longer the old Socialists”. Again, as a True
Marxist, he will both demand and promise the impossible. Only
such cases of modal political logic, as it were, will guarantee (or
so he believes) the truly revolutionary situation Žižek
yearns for.

Žižek
traces this demand
for the impossible back to the “1968 motto”: Soyons
Réalistes, Demandons L’Impossible(pg., 326). ('Let’s
be realists, demand the impossible.') That is, the workers must
demand the impossible just as the French revolutionaries demanded the
impossible, and, later, the Bolsheviks, then the Nazis, then the
Khmer Rouge, the Mao's Red Guard and so on. This demanding the
impossible comes along with the absolute and total overhaul of society
– that extreme possibility which turns Žižek
on so much. Like
many Continental philosophers before him, Žižek
is obsessed by the
extreme and by the violent – except, of course, when that extremism
and violence is carried out by Nazis and fascists or indeed by “Rightists”. (The Marxist logic here, as ever, is gruesomely
simple.)

Is all this an exaggeration on my part?
Well Žižek himself talks
about the revolutionary “Terror” he so desires (complete with
platonic or Hegelian 'T').

It's no coincidence that
Žižek refers to “Terror”
because he explains why he does so. Just as Žižek
isn't happy that the Nazis didn't go all
the way and smash capitalism, or that the post-mods mentioned throughout this piece
haven't done so today, so he's also unhappy that the Jacobins didn't
“go to the end” (130). That they didn't smash capitalism
as well as faces. In Žižek's
words, the French revolutionaries suffered from an “inability to
disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property,
etc.)”. And as with Žižek's
theory about Nazi Jew-hatred, that's why the Jacobins became
“hysterical”.

Žižek
doesn't mind “Terror”. What he does mind is the fact that
the Jacobins didn't “disturb” such things as “private
property”.

The other point worth
mentioning is that on the classic Marxist account of the French
Revolution, it wasn't to be expected (according to Marx's 'laws')
that the 18th century French revolutionaries would
overthrow capitalism or Žižek's "private property". What they did was simply
carry out 'the first revolution': the 'revolution of the
bourgeoisie'. Thus it was also only the inevitable forerunner to a
latter proletarian revolution (which was prophesised by Marx but
which never happened).

Now if we jump forward to the
21st century, Žižek
believes that a New Terror will also be inevitable because, as
he puts it, the revolutionary will pursue his “goal with an
inexorable firmness”. (This is the sort of revolutionary hard-man's
language Lenin displayed inhis The State and
Revolution.) In fact, the postmodernist “proliferation of
multiple shifting identities” is, Žižek
hopes, a prelude to a “new form of Terror”. And as I've
said, if you demand the impossible, or if you're “opting for the
impossible” (326), then Terror is almost bound to follow. Take
Žižek's word for it.

In this Leftist Terror – or in
this 'revolutionary situation' - there will be “no a
priori norms” such
as “human rights” and “democracy”. (Will the Terror continue
after the Revolution? Is the Pope a Catholic?) Instead there will be
“the ruthless exercise of power [and] the spirit of sacrifice”.
Now this is incredibly repulsive adolescent-male stuff. It's the sort
of psychotic and exhibitionist love of violence you'd expect from
such previous Continental philosophers as Georges
Sorel, George
Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. (Think
here of Foucault's “erotic infatuation” with Iran's theocratic
violence after the 1979 Revolution.)

Žižek
is proud of his demands for the impossible. In fact those who
reject them, or deny their feasibility, are nothing less that “status
quo cynics” (135).

Žižek
also comes out
with what comes very close to be a non
sequiturwhen he tells us
that True Revolutionaries believe that

“everything is possible”
and that they therefore want to “change everything” (135).

and therefore that “status
quo cynics” must believe (here's the non sequitur)
that

“nothing at all is
really possible”.

Žižek
is committing the same Marxist black-and-whitism that he
repeatedly commits. Because he
believes that post-mods, non-Marxist Leftists and God knows who else
don't believe in Total Revolution, then they must be, in effect,
counter-revolutionaries. Not only that. Because they don't accept the
only solution, Total Revolution, then they must be the friends of
capitalism and also think that there's “no other game in town”
(to use Žižek'sown
words).

Now take those on the Right
who don't believe in Žižek's Total
Revolution either. Because of that, he concludes that they believe
“nothing at all is really possible”. I suppose it's possible that
the phrases “everything is possible” and “nothing is possible”
aren't meant to be taken literally. The former, I presume, works like
such Sorelian myth of the
General Strike: simply as a meme to fire up the proletarians.
Nonetheless, what sense are we to make of the claim that some people
– any people – believe that “nothing is really possible”? Has
Žižek simply concluded
that because millions upon millions of people sincerely believe that
a Total Revolution will create more harm than good, that they must
also believe “nothing is really possible”? Even if you are
mindlessly committed to capitalism, it doesn't follow from this that
you would also think that nothing is really possible. All
sorts of things have been possible within capitalism. And, as
Žižek himself has
admitted, capitalism has created – or allowed - multiple
“subjectivities” or “hybrid identities”; as well as the adult
vote, democracy, health care and myriad other things.

But none of that matters to
Žižek because defenders of
capitalism believe that “nothing is really possible” simply
because they would rather stick with capitalism – thank you very
much. That, to Žižek,
means that they think nothing is really possible.

However, most people who
defend capitalism don't do so because they think that 'capitalism
is natural' (as Marx and the early Marxists had it), or 'inevitable', or even incapable of alteration. Žižek
is the essentialist here: not the average capitalist or
pro-capitalist. It's not the case that capitalism is “the only gamein town” either. There
are lots of other games in town: including Žižek's
Total Revolution, Islamism, post-mod hyper-reality, a Green 'hegemony', the Third Way, fascism, the Nihilist Party and so on.
It's just that most people - those who, by Marxist definition, suffer
from 'false consciousness' - don't want Žižek's
Total Revolution. There are many possibilities that literally
millions of people accept and even champion in the
West. It's just that Žižek's
Total Revolution is not one of them.

Apparently I think all this
because I'm a “bleeding-heart liberal” (326) Now I thought that
the Left hated violence and such macho-talk. I thought they weren't
fascists. Yet this sounds like the language of a fascist to me. And
indeed it is the language of a fascist – of a philosopher of
the Fascist Left. Žižek's
overall ideology may be dissimilar in some minor respects to that of
a Nazi or fascist. Nonetheless, Žižek's
talk of Leftist Terror and violence; his Marxist absolutism,
fundamentalism and essentialism; his love of complete change for its
own sake, etc., all sound pretty fascistic to me. And, as many people
know, revolutionary Nazism and fascism were, at least in large part,
off-shoots of revolutionary Marxism. All the Marxist claptrap
designed to distance the International Socialists from the National
Socialists need not be taken seriously when you think of both the
behaviour and beliefs of the Bolsheviks, Stalin, Mao's Red Guards, the Khmer
Rouge and today's street-fighting of the SWP (as well as the
“anti-fash” generally).
And now, to top all that, we have the violent words and fantasies of
Slavoj Žižek.

The Labour Party, on the whole, isn't a Marxist or a communist party. However, there are very many cross-currents and interactions between the Labour Party and the Trotskyist/communist Left, mainly on the periphery but also deeper within.

As for the Fabian Society, it isn't a “revolutionary" (as in violent revolution) organisation but it is still, nonetheless, uniquely dangerous and elitist. Its approach to "radically changing society" is very similar to that taken by the followers of the Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci.